The Wild Ride and Other Scottish Stories

This little grey book holds a treasure trove of funny; strange and magical stories. Mollie Hunter tells the tale of the bearded Uncle Archibald and his religious fanaticism, about his uneaten birthday cake and the disgrace his daughter brings to him. Joan Lingard gives us modern family life with her own brand of down-to-earth humour in a story about a fur coat full of money and the dilemma about how it should be spent, until Granny sells the coat by mistake and the dilemma is no more. Stories by George Mackay Brown, Ian Crichton Smith and Bernard McLaverty are all here to be enjoyed but my favourite has to be Lavinia Derwent's, 'The Consolation Prize'. Maybe it's because I am sure that this is a true story, or maybe it's just her turn of phrase, or maybe I share her sense of humour but this wee story made me laugh from start to finish and I wouldn't have missed it for anything! However if Puffin hope to sell a lot of these they'll have to cheer up the cover...or alternatively get every bookseller in the land to read it before it goes on the shelves so that they know what an excellent collection is hiding in there.